Then Portland Tugboat, located this time 3,000 miles on the east on the coast of the United States, posted a photo of another Google mystery barge on their Facebook page. Again, the barge supported a cubical structure of the same dimensions as in the San Francisco case and was windowless and fully enclosed.

The mystery deepens!

Ah, then finally, Tom Bell, writing for the Portland Press Herald, reported. “Its purpose and its owner’s identity have been kept secret.”

However, the mystery could very well be linked to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden said in August that Google and other technology corporations received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with PRISM, a secret mass electronic surveillance data mining program.

On October 27, CNET reported that a similar barge was docked in the San Francisco Bay. “Is it a floating Google data center? A floating Google Glass store? Or something else altogether?” asked Daniel Terdiman, writing for the tech media website. The barge is docked at a former U.S. Navy station on Treasure Island.

On October 26, Tom Bell, writing for the Portland Press Herald, reported “a four-story windowless building” docked in the Portland Harbor. “Its purpose and its owner’s identity have been kept secret.”

Despite a cover story that the barge was some sort of promotional gimmick for Google Glass, the wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display, a Google patent for a water-based data center filed in 2007 reveals a different agenda. The patent was granted in 2009.

Google is linked to the CIA and the national security state through the CIA’s technology research division, In-Q-Tel. In 2005, Google acquired the CIA funded satellite mapping software subsequently named Google Earth.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in August that Google and other technology corporations received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with PRISM, a secret mass electronic surveillance data mining program.

Fred Burton, vice president of Stratfor and a former senior State Department official, described Google as “doing things the CIA cannot do,” according to documents acquired by Wikileaks.

In 2010, Noah Shachtman, writing for Wired, reported that Google had teamed up with the CIA to back a company that developed technology to monitor the web in real time.

“The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents,” writes Shachtman. “The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down.”